Midwinter Night's Dream (2004) User Reviews

Beautifully shocking

[koenjer · 8/10 · 31 January 2005]

Normally I am hesitating to give other interpretations to a movie than ones that are very clear. While watching this movie you should not be hesitant to do so, as:

According to the director (source: introduction to the movie by him at the Rotterdam Film Festival) the autism of the girl who is one of the main characters can be seen as a metaphor for the state in which the Balkan nations are left after the wars in the 1990's.

It took me quite some time to recover from the confusion this movie left me in (alike the confusion left in the Balkan countries after the wars?). Now, after recovery I think it was a very beautifully shocking movie.

Good but depressing movie with excellent role of Lazar Ristovski

[miki-26 · 7/10 · 23 May 2005]

Just saw this movie on the Seattle film festival. It is good movie, but at moments painful to watch. Excellent role of Lazar Ristovski, well done script about girl suffering from autism.

Young girl and her mom are refugees and they come to Lazar's house while he's in prison. After 10 years he gets back to his hometown and finds them in his apartment. At first, they leave the place, but he brings them back and starts his new life with them. Their relationship evolves and he falls in love with her. At the same time he accepts young girl as his own kid. Both of them try their best to help her and make her life more joyful.

This part of movie brings hope to a new family, but again life takes new turn. It's definitely worth watching but prepare to be depressed after that.

autism versus war

[westwind1234 · 10/10 · 22 April 2006]

"A Midwinter Nights Dream" establishes a relation between autism and being in war, especially in respect to a mindset of killing or living in (post-)war situations, where handicapped self-reflection is common, due to brutal complexity of daily life. The film offers with its brilliant vision a confronting and honest understanding in the essence and motivation of possibly any war.

But to interpret the story as an attempt to insult the autist, might be rather twisted, limited and an example in this sense. I'm sorry, don't take it personally.

Yours, Candide

Tragic stories

[marinicak · 4/10 · 20 November 2013]

I will not talk about the storyline of the film. Generally film has a point in the sense of understanding autism and the difficulties people experience with such children. And this is really showed in the realistic and emotional way. However, the story that follows it is too painful to watch. Rather than that, I will talk about the emotions I felt while watching it. First you have sadness and empathy for people's tragic destinies. Then there is a glimpse of optimism and hope. Sadness is, however, still present. Then you feel disgust and anger and at the end you don't know whether to be depressed or angry because of the fact you have watched this movie. Ending is totally naive and unnecessarily tragic.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,or what's a heaven for?

[allenrogerj · 22 July 2010]

No, I don't know what Browning meant here either, but it does reflect an aspect of Paskaljevic's film-making- especially here. He could make very good realistic quiet films, but he tries to do something more difficult and more ambitious. He doesn't succeed, but it raises the question of whether a big failure is in some way better than a small triumph.

The film is set around Jovana, an autistic girl who acts- or rather- is- herself- for one thing autistic people cannot do is pretend- while the other actors act their characters around her. Quite a few scenes- including the version of A Midsummer Night's Dream the title refers to- are in Jovana's school with other disabled children taking part, reflecting Paskaljevic's use of documentary as a background for the film. The plot is simple: Lazar returns from prison, after serving ten years for killing his best friend. He served in a killer-unit of the Serbian army in the wars after the collapse of Jugoslavia and has nightmares about what he did. His mother has died and the house is now occupied by Jovana and her mother, refugees from Bosnia-Herzevogina. At first Lazar tries to throw them out, but then relents and lets them stay. He is fascinated by Jovana and tries to reach or "cure" her, but gradually he learns, like her mother, to accept her as she is. Meanwhile he falls in love with the mother. It could be a brief, realistic, redemptive story, reflecting the redemptions of Shakespeare's play, but this is Paskaljevic and this is Serbia and even a dubious redemption cannot be allowed. Jovana's mother worked as a waitress and was harassed by a drunk there. He may be Jovanna's father; characteristically, Paskaljevic leaves this aside, as he does LAzar's pre-war work- the worst tasks of the Serb army were done by criminal conscripts, and Lazar's ex-boss both owes him a lot of money and is terrified of him. After she and Lazar have become lovers, the drunk suddenly re-appears at their house and tries to woo Marija again and he kills her- possibly accidentally, it happens too rapidly to tell- with the dress-making scissors Marija holds. a neighbour accuses Lazar of the murder- again, we don't know how sincerely; the neighbour had stolen Laxar's mother's crockery and furniture and had been watching the house obsessively. Lazar drives away with Jovana and the body to a wood and as Jovana wanders away through the trees (echoing A Midsummer Night's Dream, perhaps), Lazar shoots himself. This is the flaw of the film, I think. It expands the story's significance beyond what it can carry and, whatever happened in and to Serbia and Serbs, the gentle solipsism of Jovana cannot be a convincing analogy for the murderous self-obsession that dominated that country for so long.

Lay on extra levels of ultra-depression, because that's what gets you awards.

[fedor8 · 7 July 2022]

A typical "kitchen sink" drama, but made the Balkan way, meaning with even bigger doses of unnecessary depression and with the obligatory nonsense that predictably occurs near the end of the film. Raise your hands, anyone who didn't know that everything would end very badly for the main characters. Are there any such people in the audience at all? Does this movie even have an audience?

Two idiotic scenes really help destroy this anyway already mediocre movie. The first one is when some lawyer stereotype gets into Ristovski's taxi and Ristovski informs him that he is not driving anymore, that he is finishing for the day. Well, then, if his working hours were over, why did he open the door to a passenger in the first place? Even more stupid is the passenger replying to Ristovski by calling him a "moron" - which really is moronic. Very forced abnormal/immoral behavior - as if the idiocy that Paskaljevic prepared for the viewer just a few minutes later weren't enough.

Namely, Ristovski's wife is killed in a scene completely devoid of logic, a totally nebulous scene worthy of some cretinous low-budget thriller. An ex-lover (or whatever) comes to her place and offers her flowers. She rejects him, and then he STABS her with a KNIFE, immediately, without any warning, without any attempts to talk to her, not even a word. Who comes to reconcile with a person, bringing over a bouquet of roses - and a knife? ("I'll bring the flowers, of course, but just in case I believe a knife should come in handy too.") Ask Paskaljevic and Ristovski, they are responsible for this very frivolous script.

Then Ristovski takes an autistic girl to some shack, in order to put a bullet through her and then himself. She however leaves the car, goes somewhere. Where? Sorry, no clue. Coz that's where the movie ends.

So the film delivers its extremely negative ending, its predictably negative ending, because we already know in advance how these morose dramas end when a Balkan director is in charge: at least one main character must be killed. Still, Paskaljevic was quite "ambitious" so he wondered if he should kill off all of the main characters in a short period of time, similarly to what occurs in "Taxi Driver".

Generally, Paskaljevic has a habit of killing off the main characters at the end of the film, because I guess the man doesn't have a lot of imagination, so he thinks that only such drastic, overly dramatic endings have enough "cinematic power" to help him get a few more awards at the usual inept European festivals. I suppose he might have learned that from Shakespeare, I really don't know. This is anyway a mega-cliché in Serbian films that the main characters get knocked off at the end, and that nearly always implies, if not outright proves, that the writer was struggling how to end the story. It's just plain laziness.

But hey, Goran Paskaljevic is a nepotist. Why wonder...